Mantella
A fast, minimal PDF reader for your Mac.
Point Mantella at a folder of PDFs and it becomes your library — crisp native-quality rendering, instant search, and it always remembers exactly where you left off.
Mantella is a lightweight desktop PDF reader built for people who live in PDFs — papers, books, manuals, sheet music — and want them to open instantly and look sharp at any zoom level.
Choose a library folder and Mantella scans it for PDFs and keeps it in sync as files come and go. Pages are rendered by pdfium, the same engine Chromium uses, so everything looks exactly as it should. No accounts, no cloud, no clutter.
Your folder is your library
Pick a folder and Mantella recursively finds every PDF inside it, presenting them in a browsable folder tree that stays in sync as you add, move, or remove files on disk.
Picks up where you left off
Mantella remembers the page, scroll position, and zoom level for every file individually. Close a book mid-chapter and it opens right back to the same spot — even weeks later.
Find things fast
Search your whole library by filename, navigate the folder tree, and pin your favorites so the documents you reach for most are always one click away.
Native-quality rendering
Pages are rendered by pdfium — Chromium's PDF engine — on a dedicated worker thread, so text and figures stay crisp at any zoom level and scrolling stays smooth even in large documents.
Keyboard friendly
Navigate pages, zoom, and search without touching the mouse. Common actions all have shortcuts, so reading stays fluid.
Light and private
Built with Tauri and Rust, Mantella is small and fast. Your reading state is stored locally on your Mac — there's no account, no sync service, and no tracking.